In Memoriam

I like to come up to my son's bedroom occasionally and read. It's a nice loft conversion and it's quiet, with sometimes the only noise being the gentle patter of rain on the roof windows or when his beer fridge cuts in. It's a real boy's bedroom although at twenty one, going on twenty two, you'd think it's time he put aside the Star Wars posters ... or the special issue light sabre lying on its mount next to the certificates he got for being his high school sports champion three years in a row. He's a boy (I know he's a man but I always think of him as a boy) who likes to hold on to the past.

It's not always pristine but he's usually pretty tidy and the general impression is one of organised clutter. His shelves are filled with things he's collected over the years and which he cannot bring himself to throw away. Every small thing is invested with some precious memory of some special occasion. There's the baseball he bought when I took him and his brother to Yankee stadium; the golf ball wedged in a rock with the legend 'Play it as it lies' from our visit to the USPGA headquarters in Far Hills, New Jersey. A lot of the books we bought for him, but which he never read because he was never much of reader, are here because he hasn't the heart to throw them out.

In a corner is the Captain America outfit that his best friend, Jack, wore to another pal's 21st birthday party two weeks before he was killed in a road accident. There too are Jack's football training shoes, the left one worn out near the instep where he contacted the ball to make it curve goalwards. He was good at football and so many other things. There's his old fleece that he wore almost every time we saw him when he came by our house on the way to a bounce game at the park. I went with my son after Jack died to his flat where he picked up these mementoes of his best friend. He buried his face in the fleece and cried so much and I tried to comfort him. And all I could think of was how I would feel if it was him and not Jack who had been taken away and I do not know if I could live with that pain. We have to live with our selfishness.

And now I cannot bear to look at that picture I took of the two of them that night, my boy dressed as Superman and Jack as Captain America. They looked - it's so cruelly ironic - invulnerable. But our children are not invulnerable and bad things happen. I am blessed, I know I am, but I am also afraid.